The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution

by Carl R. Trueman

Such attitudes to religion and its implications now pervade contemporary culture, from legal judgments that see a desire to maintain Christian marriage as the result of irrational animus to comments by politicians about those who cling to guns and religion as a means of justifying and fueling their resentment and bitterness toward society in general.

religious belief represents either personal immaturity or some form of psychological defect is now such a deeply embedded cultural commonplace that it is rarely considered necessary to offer any justification for what is deemed a self-evident, objective, undeniable truth.

irrational human desire; as a result, its adherents are not vulnerable to rational refutation.

social contract of Rousseau is, in the hands of Freud, turned into a sexual contract, exchanging uninhibited sexual license for sexual restraint. And the result is civilization.

Guilt is the internal regulator of the individual’s sexual conduct.

then to the extent that such desires are curbed and thereby frustrated, to that extent the individual will be unfulfilled and unhappy.

Thus the pleasure principle, the desire for sexual fulfillment, has to find within society different outlets either for its release

or its sublimation.

The self must first be psychologized; psychology must then be sexualized; and sex must be politicized. The

before Freud, sex was an activity, for procreation or for recreation; after Freud, sex is definitive of who we are, as individuals, as societies,

sex sells.

And it sells because sexual desire is something that human beings experience as among the most powerful and irrational forces in life.

The end of human life is no longer something set in the future; rather, it is enclosed within the present.

satisfied is to be sexually fulfilled here and now.

The idea of religion as childish and of sexual morality as driven by taste, not transcendent divine or natural law, are perhaps the two most obvious. Regarding the latter, he also reinforces the shift

Contemporary education has become in some quarters preoccupied with the liberation of children’s sexual instincts and the elimination of any religious influence whatsoever.

There is a darkness to human nature for which Rousseau simply cannot account, and the amorality of nature and its instinctual violence make Sade and Nietzsche more compelling as analysts of the human condition—a tradition of thought that finds its expression in a scientific idiom in Freud.

Critical theory is today a diverse phenomenon that draws deeply and variously on strands of Marxist thought, psychoanalysis, feminist theory, postcolonialism, poststructuralism, queer theory, and deconstruction.

world is to be divided up between those who have power and those who do not;

construct designed to preserve the power structure of the status quo; and the goal of critical theory is therefore to destabilize this power structure by destabilizing the dominant narratives that are used to justify—to “naturalize”—it.2 While critical

for him this would culminate in the triumph of the working class (the proletariat) over the middle class (the bourgeoisie).

shift involved the replacement of the capitalist system with a communist one, in which the means of production would be held in common ownership by the workers in the form of the state.

Russia, as a predominantly peasant society, had not undergone the necessary capitalist development that was supposed to be the precondition for the advent of communism;

therefore, we see the roots of the modern approach to political revolution

the transformation of cultural institutions such as schools and the media.

But one needed a vanguard of intellectuals to accomplish this aim.

The influence of the Frankfurt School has been far reaching, from contributing to discussions of aesthetics to possibly inspiring the central character in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus.7

First, there was the complexity of welding together an approach to human life that prioritized the material and economic in the context of society at large with one that focused on the psychological and the individual. Then

Marxism offered a fundamentally optimistic view of the world because, whatever the suffering and traumas that might characterize the road to the worker’s paradise, that paradise was surely coming at some point in the future.

society that was prepared to repress the most fundamental of human instincts, the desire for sexual satisfaction via unhindered sexual activity.

Reich is particularly interested in a standard Marxist problem: Why do members of a certain class act against their own class interests?

What Reich does here is adopt Freud’s basic point about civilization/culture—that it is the product of sexual repression—while refusing to make this a transcendent truth, preferring to relativize it.

Sexual codes are part of the ideology of the governing class, designed to maintain the status quo so as to benefit those in power.

answer, stated rather than supported with any evidence, is that it began with the rise of authoritarian patriarchy and was subsequently reinforced by the rise of a sex-negating church.

authoritarian state gains an enormous interest in the authoritarian family. It becomes the factory in which the state’s structure

ideology are moulded.17

the traditional patriarchal family is a unit of oppression.

who argue for the traditional family as a societal good are really lackeys, witting or unwitting, of the current oppressive status quo.

quo.

so at the heart of Reich’s revolutionary program is sex education and the need for children and adolescents to be allowed sexual freedom.

Reich also believes that the state must be used to coerce families and, where necessary, actively punish those who dissent from the sexual liberation being proposed.

When oppression comes to be thought of as primarily psychological, then victimhood becomes a potentially much

broader—and much more subjective—category. This affects everything, from reasoning in Supreme Court

ethics to campus politics an...

In its simplest formulation: today’s social struggles are being waged between those forces interested in the safeguarding and

affirming of life and those whose interests lie in its destruction and negation.

psychologically oppressive actions: the refusal to bake a cake for a gay wedding,

is nobody’s business what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own home” miss the point. Sex is no longer

private activity because sexuality is a constitutive element of public, social identity.

The sexual education of the child is simply of too much social and political consequence to be left to the parents.